RepRap Life Cycle Assessment
Based on a debate started in the forums, this page attempts to perform a Life Cycle Assement of the RepRap. Due to limitations of manpower an materials the assesment is based on extrapolating information from other sources. E.g. the American Chemistry Council, The Australian Governments "Review of the Environmental Impact of Wood Compared with Alternative Producs Used in the Production of Furniture" and similar reports.
Only a few hours of searching on the Internet will make it patently obvious that the various LCAs published by various organizations, does show vested interests by most publishing agencies. Some have blatant oversights, e.g. that dumping a substance in a landfill constitutes End of Life, completely ignoring mechanical, biological and chemical decomposition. Furthermore the actual numbers presented in the published LCAs vary hugely, more than what I believe can reasonably be explained by regional differences.
I have tried to take a conservative approach, e.g. trusting the numbers published by organizations like the American Chemistry Council, even though they do appear to have an interest in demonstrating that plastics have a very low impact, the numbers presented by ACC are lower than the comparable numbers by the European counterpart, but the conservative approach dictates that I choose the ACC numbers. I have filtered out some information, which I suspect of being falsified, e.g. a plastic pallet company, which has numbers in excess of 5 times better than the ACC's numbers.
To make matters even worse, PLA and Wood initially performs a storage of CO2 which is then released at the End of Life, whereas expenditure of fossil fuels releases CO2 into the atmosphere. Accounting for this temporary storage of CO2 in an attempt to make CO2 levels of fossil fuels and materials like PLA and Wood appears to somewhat of an "art form", where different reports use different formulas and even where they use the same formulas, certain constants are tweaked, depending on expected lifetime, and other reasonings which appears rather opaque to me. In short, I get the impression that when comparing Wood and similar CO2 storing materials with fossil fuel, you can get almost any result you desire.
In short, there are lies, damn lies and then there is statistics. So any numbers taken from this page is certain to be incorrect; they are based on the intention of being objective, but I have no doubt that anybody can produce any results they may wish.
